The Medieval Mind. Henry Osborn Taylor
and fastings, and preaching the word of life. Certain heathen men were converted, then the king, and then his folk in multitudes—the usual way. Under the direction of Gregory, Augustine proceeded with that combination of insistence, dignity, and tolerance, so well understood in the Roman Church. There was insistence upon the main doctrines and requirements of the Faith—upon the Roman Easter day and baptism, as against the practices of the British Church. Tolerance was shown respecting heathen fanes and sacrificial feastings; the fanes should be reconsecrated as Christian churches; the feasts should be continued in honour of the true God.[208]
Besides zeal and knowledge and authority, miracles advanced Augustine’s enterprise. To eliminate by any sweeping negation the miraculous element from the causes of success of such a mission is to close the eyes to the situation. All men expected miracles; Gregory who sent Augustine was infatuated with them. Augustine performed them, or believed he did, and others believed it too. Throughout these centuries, and indeed late into the mediaeval period, the power and habit of working miracles constituted sainthood in the hermit or the monk, thereby singled out as the special instrument of God’s will or the Virgin’s kindness. Of course miracles were ascribed to the great missionary apostles like Augustine or Boniface; and this conviction brought many conversions.
Among the heathen English about to be converted, there was diversity of view and mood as to the Faith. They stood in awe of these newcomers from Rome, fearing their spell-craft. From their old religion they had sought earthly victory and prosperity; and some had found it of uncertain aid. “See, king, how this matter stands,” says Coifi, at the Northumbrian Witenagemot held by Edwin to decide as to the new religion: “I have learned of a certainty that there is no virtue or utility whatever in that religion which we have been following. None of your thanes has slaved in the worship of our gods more zealously than I. Yet many have had greater rewards and dignities from you, and in every way have prospered more. Were the gods worth anything, they would wish rather to aid me, who have been so zealous in serving them. So if these new teachings are better and stronger, let us accept them at once.”[209] Coifi expressed the common motives of converts of all nations from the time of Constantine. No better thought of Christian expediency had inspired Gregory of Tours’s story of Clovis’s career; and Bede in no way condemns Coifi’s verba prudentiae, as he terms them. Naturally in times of adversity such converts were quick to abandon their new religion, proved ineffectual.[210]
Among these Angles of Northumberland, however, finer souls were looking for light and certitude. Such a one was that thane who followed Coifi with the wonderful illustration of man’s mortal need of enlightenment, the thane for whom life was as the swallow flying through the warmed and lighted hall, from the dark cold into the dark cold: “So this life of men comes into sight for a little; we are ignorant of what shall follow or what may have preceded. If this new doctrine offers anything more certain, I think we should follow it.” The heathen poetry had given varied voice to this contemplative melancholy so wont to dwell on life’s untoward changes; and there was ghostly evidence of the other world before the coming of the Roman monks. Now, as those monks came with authority from the traditionary home of ghostly lore, why question their knowledge of the life beyond the grave? Many Anglo-Saxons were prepared to fix their gaze upon a life to come and to let their fancies fill with visions of the great last severance unto heaven and hell. When once impressed by the monastic Christianity[211] of the Roman, or the Irish, mission, they were quick to throw themselves into the ascetic life which most surely opened heaven’s doors. So many a noble thane became an anchorite or a monk, many a noble dame became a nun; and Saxon kings forsook their kingdoms for the cloister: “Cenred, who for some time had reigned most nobly in Mercia, still more nobly abandoned his sceptre. For he came to Rome, and there was tonsured and made a monk at the church of the Apostles, and continued in prayers and fastings and almsgiving until his last day.”[212]
As might be expected, the re-expression of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon writings was martial and emotional. A martial tone pervades the epic paraphrases of Scripture, the Anglo-Saxon Genesis for example. On the other hand, adaptations of devotional Latin compositions[213] evince a realization of Christian feeling and prevalent ascetic sentiments. The “elegiac” Anglo-Saxon feeling seems to reach its height in a more original composition, the Christ of Cynewulf, while the emotional fervour coming with Christianity is disclosed in Bede’s account of the inspiration which fell upon the cowherd Cædmon, in St. Hilda’s monastery of Whitby, to sing the story of creation.[214] A pervasive monastic atmosphere also surrounds the visions of hell and purgatory, which were to continue so typically characteristic of monastic Christianity.[215]
What knowledge, sacred and profane, came to the Anglo-Saxons with Christianity? Quite properly learned were Augustine and the other organizers of the English Church. Two generations after him, the Greek monk Theodore was sent by the Pope to become Archbishop of Canterbury, complete Augustine’s work, and instruct the English monks and clergy. Theodore was accompanied by his friend Hadrian, as learned as himself. Their labours finally established Roman Christianity in England. The two drew about them a band of students, and formed at Canterbury a school of sacred learning, where liberal studies were conducted by these foreigners with a knowledge and intelligence novel in Great Britain. In the north, Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian, promoted the ends of Roman Catholicism and learning by establishing the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow under the monastic regula of St. Benedict of Nursia, as modified by the practices of continental monasteries in the seventh century. He had been in Italy, and brought thence many books. It was among these books that Bede grew up at Jarrow.
Thus strong currents of Roman ecclesiasticism and liberal knowledge reached England. On the other hand, Irish monastic Christianity had already made its entry in the south-western part of Great Britain, and with greater strength established itself in the north, converting multitudes to the Faith and instructing such as would learn. The Irish teaching had been eagerly received by those groups of Anglo-Saxons who henceforth were to prosecute their studies with the aid of the further knowledge and discipline brought from the Continent by Theodore. Some of them had even journeyed to Ireland to study.
From this dual source was drawn the education of Aldhelm. He was born in Wessex about the year 650, and was nephew of the powerful King Ini. He became abbot of Malmesbury in 675. An Irish monk was his first teacher; his second, the learned Hadrian. From the two he received a broader education than any Anglo-Saxon had possessed before him. Always holding in view the perfecting of his sacred knowledge, he studied grammar and kindred topics, produced treatises himself, and as a Catholic student and teacher was a true forerunner of the greatest scholar among his younger contemporaries, Bede.[216]
Bede the Venerable, and we may add the still beloved, was Aldhelm’s junior by some twenty-five years. He was born in 673 and died in 735. He passed his whole life reading, teaching, and writing in the Cloister of Jarrow near where he was born, and not far from where, beneath the “Galilee” of Durham Cathedral, his bones have long reposed. Back of him was the double tradition of learning, the Irish and the Graeco-Roman. Through a long life of pious study, Bede drew into his mind, and incorporated in his writings, practically the total sum of knowledge then accessible in western Europe. He stands between the great Latin transmitters (Boëthius, Cassiodorus, Gregory and Isidore) and the epoch known as the Carolingian. He was himself a transmitter of knowledge to that later time. If in spirit, race, epoch and circumstances, Aldhelm was Bede’s direct forerunner, Bede had also a notable predecessor in Isidore. The writings of the Spanish bishop contributed substance and suggestions of plan and method to the Anglo-Saxon monk, whose works embrace practically the same series of topics as Isidore’s, whose intellectual interests also, and attitude toward the Church Fathers, appear the same. But Bede was the more genial personality, and could not help imbuing his compositions with something from his own temperament. Even in his Commentaries upon the books of Scripture, which were made up principally of borrowed allegorical interpretations, there is common sense and some endeavour to present the actual meaning and situation.[217] But he disclaimed originality, as he says in the preface to his Commentary on the Hexaemeron, addressed to Bishop Acca of Hexham:
“Concerning the beginning of Genesis where the creation of the world is described, many have said much, and have left to posterity monuments of their talents. Among these, as far as our feebleness can learn, we may distinguish Basil of Caesarea (whom Eustathius